Lee Chang-dong’s missing-person drama was a flickering gem that forwent easy thrills for a deeply unsettling unresolvednessThe 50 best films of 2019 in the UKMore best culture of 2019South Korea has claimed its place at international cinema’s top table over the last couple of decades, what with the baroque savagery of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy and the razor-sharp precision of Bong Joon-ho’s social parables – culminating in his Palme d’Or win for Parasite. (That, due to the vagaries of the release schedule, won’t be part of the Guardian’s
UK top 50 lineup for 2019, though it does qualify for the US list.) With all the big beasts out there, it would have been a shame if this remarkable film from Lee Chang-dong had been crowded out.
Burning is adapted from a short story Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami. (The title has been shortened, the location moved from
Japan to Korea and the central character is not married.) Jong-su is directionless twentysomething, an aspiring writer with a fondness for William Faulkner and saddled with an aggressive father – whose arrest and trial for assault means Jong-su has to spend long hours at the family farm looking after the livestock. A chance meeting with Hae-mi, a girl from his schooldays who he doesn’t remember, sets in train the film’s ineluctably strange events.